There's a halo on that truck, won't you please get it for me?

I am guilty of ageism. I assume that great music is the proxy of youth and that the grey haired middle aged former rockers are just embarrassments cashing in retirement boosting cheques. I sneer at yet another Crosby, Stills and Nash reunion tour, I really do not give a shit about seeing the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney. I tend to question whether we really need to see Dr Feelgood when I know the great Lee Brilleaux died in 1994 and he was the last of the original members? Part of my snub is the simple fact that I tend to view popular music as living and constantly creating and with so much amazing new music overwhelming me why get stuck in a time lapse repeat, the historical musical GIF that defines many people's sadly shrinking soundtrack? Part is of course snobbery as I have a habit of dropping bands from heavy rotation when they are succeeding in the mainstream and they have moved from shitty small clubs to stadiums and platinum sales, and moving on to someone else trying to get their songs heard.
So I was intrigued when I discovered Television were playing the Independent. I never saw them in their pomp but adored their records in the spatter shock of seventies spunk rock. I thought, well, WTF,  for $25 on a quiet November night, why not get tickets? I will admit my interest was actually sparked by a great free album put out by the LA label Aquarium Drunkard who got a bunch of up and coming LA bands to cover Television's stunning second album Adventure as a showcase. I loved L'Aventure and it introduced me to the Growlers and the Henry Clay people as well as the contribution by the Local Natives who I enjoy. The unintended consequence was I was reminded how damn good Television were and so this was too good an opportunity. It was sold out and the audience was, as to be expected, largely a sausage fest, dominated by the softening silhouette of the greying middle age with a smattering of the bearded youth.
Tom Verlaine looked less gaunt and less hirsute, but generally pretty much what he looked like in his foxhole. The others looked much like 50 year old versions of themselves with the exception of Jimmy Rip, who replaced Richard Lloyd in 2007, who looked exactly like John Muir, as my good friend Andrew noted. Tom struggled with his tunings in what seemed more like a nervous tic than any major musical handicap, as a true luddite he eschews those electronic tuners and does it all by ear which is brave with aging stage-shot hearing. His voice is still reedy and not a little whiny but it was still pretty good in his bratty way, the backing vocals on Glory and Prove It brought it all back.
What transformed it from being just another karaoke walk in the park for some old stagers was the stunning guitar interplay between Verlaine and Rip with both trading off lead and rhythm and the straying from the note by note replay into the land of extemporization over the solid bass and drum drive train. They released an album in 1992 which I had never heard until after the gig when I sought it out but they played 1880 or So from it and they have been playing a song called Persia on this tour, and in recent years, that is supposed to be on the new album which they have been promising for many marquee moons. I wish they would just fucking get on with it as that song alone is worth the price of admission. They manage to channel the insanely good Paul Butterfield Blues Band's East-West and rai music into this chugging grinding guitar duel for 10 minutes or so, breathtaking to watch as they look at each other thinking about whether to just see where the journey takes them.
Watching these 4 geezers - officially they not only look it but they are old enough now to be called geezers with some sense of pride - in the blue stage lights with a stack of battered Vox amps behind them, truly kicking some guitar ass, was affirmation that "dem yute" don't hold the franchise for live musical excitement. I hope they do finally get a new piece of work out there as by the evidence of this admittedly smallish crowd there is an audience for their spiky guitar driven odes to the quotidian.
While I await that I was also happy to discover a reinvigorated Sebodah this week who returned after 14 years in the wilderness with a truly cracking album Defend Yourself, so a long hiatus can be worth the wait.
As I listen to that chunk of cheery trashy rock I will comfort myself with a large bottle of Tank 7 farmhouse beer from Boulevard Brewing from Kansas City, a place that has absolutely nothing in common with Max's Kansas City where Television started their long journey in 1974.

Frank Zappa is alive and well and living in the body of a 28 year old Vietnamese woman

After 3 months of expectations and excitement for Outsidelands it took 3 days to drain that enthusiasm and replace it with ennui and exhaustion. August in San Francisco is the preferred vacation spot for Karl the Fog and he really likes to hang out in Golden Gate Park. So forewarned and forearmed with layers and liquids the women in my life and I tried different approaches to survive the joys of portapotties, freezing winds washing away any sense of warmth seeping through the cloud from the anaemic sun and the additional 10,000 guests (yes, just an extra 10,000 for this year) the organisers decided to share the event with each day.
So lets get some quick throwaway rants in early in a belated attempt at cathartic release:
Portapotties - you can't walk within 200 yards of the multiple recycle facilities without stumbling over a 'volunteer' to guide you as to the puzzle of which coloured bin your trash du jour is destined for. Yet they can't clean the piss soaked, shit sprayed, paper strewn Hades masquerading as toilet facilities that you have to line up for 20 minutes to endure more than once a day. Thanks for that Outsidelands. I mean seriously, what is wrong with people? why can't they just do their bidness in the correct hole?
Stage frights - Outhouselands has 4 stages, one big enough for Woodstock on the Polo Fields where the headliners play and all the fast track stars jostle for earlier slots. One in the hollow over the hill at Land's End which in less packed times hosts male nocturnal bonding the type of which you would expect in SF, if you get my drift. This stage named for resurgent local hero Sutro is notable for nothing other than is in a natural bowl so acoustics are good but suffers from 2nd child syndrome and gets forgotten so it hosts what you could describe as oddities, or people who they know are too big for the small act stage but too small for the two main stages. They often get it wrong like Alabama Shakes, last year, who drew more than either of the main attractions. As the bowl only occupies the very end of Land's End and is lower than the rest of the field the sound stage manages to block the view for anyone beyond the first 200 feet of crowd. Luckily this year for both Jessie Ware and Thao that was not a problem. The training wheel stage is Panhandle and features small or breaking acts and is usually the best venue to catch the up and coming, except this year when Daughter were scheduled there mid afternoon on Friday and the hype around 'Get Lucky' drew out the curious and it was a zoo. The sound system is set up for a small stage so good luck to the poor bastards half a mile away enduring a crap mix and the rain that Karl decided to share with us. The other headliner stage is distinct only in so far as its fucking miles from the other one so the egos of the battling superheroes don't get tweaked by being able to hear each other. This Twin Peaks stage has a bias to EDM it seems, but not uniquely.
The Old Bait and Switch: So when you first see the line up in April you are excited about SO many bands that you want to check out. The first disappointment is when the daily roster is released in May and you realise that your favourites are on Friday, followed by Saturday, and then Sunday looks slim pickings. The next deflation is when they release in July the play order and stage allocation and you realise that most of who you want to see are early afternoon and playing not only at the same time but at different ends of the park.
So how did we approach this marathon endurance event masquerading as a fun filled music lovers dream weekend?
So we tried 3 different strategies. Friday we did the "bounce", going from stage to stage, feeling like Salmon swimming up stream but instead of avoiding dams and Grizzly Bears you are ducking round bro's with beers, stoned Marina girls in 'festival garb' and yet more recycle 'ambassadors'. Result: exhaustion and sore feet. Saturday we were late, again, and missed most of Gary Clark Jr but decided to avoid the bruising mid stream battles and do the "bunny hop", just do two stages and take a break and visit Winelands. Young The Giant were quintessentially LA and pretended to enjoy playing in the mid afternoon gloaming, they are good and he has a great voice so the new album should sell like cough syrup. The Yeah Yeah Yeah's dialled in a professional set which please the masses although it was funny when Karen O needed to get 'refreshed' two songs from the end and disappeared off stage for way too long. Sunday we were late, yet again, there is a pattern here I know. Exhaustion was a current and present danger so we tried the "camper" move and decided to get a spot and camp on our blanket and actually not move. The Foals totally killed it and grabbed the crowd's buzzed attention early afternoon by the throat and left many converts in their wake. We made fast and firm buds with the groups either side of us in a Woodstock-redux kind of communion and desperate to avoid Hall and Oates we went for food and beers naively thinking we will be able to find our way back to our little blanket oasis before Vampire Weekend. H and O are a lot more popular than I gave them credit for so the salmon upstream spawning runs of Friday paled into insignificance compared to the interminable interloping we did to inveigle ourselves through the drunk stoned millennials and the not insignificant number of 40 somethings who are normally found at H and O's more traditional venues of late, ie Harrah's Reno and assorted tacky wineries. At one point their guitarist took photos of the crowd, I guarantee it was the biggest crowd he had played to. When we finally reached our erstwhile inner sanctum our new buds had fought a brave rearguard and our bags and shit were intact but as they then disappeared to watch Willie Nelson over on Sutro the extra 10,000 attendees each personally walked over our blanket to get better positioned for Vampire Weekend. Having watched the excellent Weekend at the Fox in May discretion became the better part of valour when our view was blocked by not 1, but 3, butt cracks as the chicas way-hayed on the shoulders of the young gallants right in front of us and we decided enough, already.
One of the overall treats was the ebullient local hero Thao Nguyen on Saturday. Thao and the Get Down Stay Downs played an amazing and bouncy fun yet superbly tight sets with the addition of horns. The first thing that struck me is how Zappaesque her music is, especially with the great brass section channelling the funk of Napoleon Murphy Brock and the Fowler brothers of the great mid 70's line up under Frank's challenging direction. She plays with unusual time signatures, sings serious songs about serious shit and has a great sense of humour, she also is a hell of a guitarist as well as playing mandolin and banjo, without any risk of Deliverance parodies. She was playing to a loving and growing home crowd but everyone realised how fucking good they were, one of those occasions where the added frisson of the improvisation around the brass really helped them get into a new place. So the Foals grabbed the most hearts by being on the main stage but on that Sutro stage on a grey afternoon Thao kept the faithful rewarded.
So if you were stranded in the fog amongst at least 10,000 too many stoned people and badly needed a drink then for certain the overpriced wines in Winelands would not cut it and who really needs to pay $9 for Heineken? so my $9 was spunked down on Sierra Nevada's Torpedo, guaranteed to sink the S.S. Sceptic and leave you floating like flotsam amongst Thao's uncommon terpsichore.

Who is that there in my garage at this time of night?

My neighbour, Ben, had to knock on the door and ask me to turn the noise down as his was wife was not feeling well. It was mid evening, Friday, and I was playing dumb Hollywood noise through the bassy surround sound and that was preventing his wife from continuing her healing mode. I am a patient and sensitive neighbour so I wanted to be neighbourly.  As it happened I had finished the paid Apple TV dumbnity – Gangster Squad, if you insisted in asking, and that was as straight up as dumb a way to spend both $3.99 and 113 minutes of my life as goes – so I was happy to comply and turn it off. I had been crowning the likely-too-loud Josh Brolin inanity with a preview of a documentary about a Detroit proto punk band called Death from the early 70’s which seemed to rely on a Jack White quote as being its only tenuous link to modern culture’s view of the roots of punk.

Punk, as viewed by someone on the very fringes at the time of the nascent movement, was always about lo-fi, do-it-yourself responses to stadium excess-fueled old fart rock. When it reached me as a student 150 miles north of its Chiswick epicenter I embraced it with the same enthusiasm as post depression youth in the US in 1932 must have treated the repeal of Prohibition, “I can have this much fun for so little money, yes please!” I had heard the NewYork Dolls and the Velvets so could see a path from them to the one chord wonders and it was fun to dress up in the best that thrift stores were able to serve up. We embraced our father’s 60’s suits with thin lapels, the thin ties and jeans that said we were not loons, that we were no hippies and that we were young, dammit! We did not wear bondage pants, torn Sex Pistol t-shirts or sport bright red Mohawks. That came later when “Punk” had been packaged and sold to the suburban disenchanted youff.

I remember vividly from those days the contrast of the iceberg youth culture called Teddy Boys.

These discharged floating detritus from the glacial late 50’s and early 60’s sported elaborate pomaded quiffs, equally elaborate brocade waistcoats beneath long frock coat jackets with contrast collars – the Edwardian look, shortened by the popular media to Teddy. They also sported what today would be called skinny jeans but were known then as drainpipes and the whole look supported by crepe soled ‘brothel creepers’. The name of the shoes says more about cultural mores from the 1950’s than hours of dry docudrama. What completed their fossilized fall from grace was that most of them by the time I encountered them as adults in the 70’s was that the archetypal look worked well with mal nourished child products of post-war rationing – low protein diet’s answer to heroin chic – but less well on middle age men fueled by beer carbohydrates a plenty. The women in their crinoline petticoats, stiletto heels, patent belts and beehives were obviously struggling with the adjustment in diet too by the time I saw them. So they were all reduced to caricatures, middle age, defeated and fading. They remind me of Green Day and the troops of suburban punk fans flocking to the Cat Club each weekend. Dreams shrunken into a two-decade reduction sauce thickened by the intervening grasp of gravity, gravy and grogg.

So what sounds drive the heart of today’s young punks at a furious pace and if not protest, at least position their taste to the south of radio-driven pap? You are not fighting Reaganism, Thatcherism, the end of Socialism but you are young, you must be angry about something for fuck’s sake? How about continuing institutionalized sexism? No, you like your porn and your film stars a shaven silly-coned. How about the ever widening poverty gap as the rich 2% grab more and more while selling the Globe's future down the river? No, you really only care about whether the Galaxy 4S is cooler or not than the i-phone.

So here we are, much ado about nothing? Life is shit but we no longer care enough to need a protest songbook, it’s just a question of paying off the student debt and keeping up on Facebook or Reddit? Occupy ourselves might be a starting point. If my cynicism is too shaded to the grey depressive wallpapered end of the hallway of culture we will only need to look at our new and engaging popular music as a counterpoint. The light burns brightly thanks to American Idol, the always so relevant Grammys and Swedish House Mafia doing Vodka ads with robotic greyhounds. Or we throw ourselves off the cultural bridge into the traffic below.

Meanwhile the glacier that is garage music continues its inexorable slither through the city, the suburbs and the sentient undergrowth that lives outside of the mainstream.

It’s beat is fast, it’s heart is open. It’s drums are loud, quick and up front. It’s guitar is riffy and it’s keyboards are driving me home. It’s vocals are catchy, mumbling, strident and simplistic – this is not a tale of a topographic ocean nor a rococo suburb. It likes fuzz. It likes distortion; in fact distortion is a creed to be followed with total commitment.

I remembered when songs that lasted less than 3 minutes meant more than 3 albums of self indulgent crap and garage music highlights what dance music forgets sometimes in its chemical exuberance, less is actually more after all.

I love the Thee Oh Sees for being alive, noisy and active. They play lots of gigs around town, always up for fundraisers; play gay leather pubs as often as the Fillmore. They appeared today on a free compilation which was sponsored by Doctor Pepper. At this point you could justifiably be forgiven for throwing up a spicy spume of sassafras flavored invective but God Bless those folks at Adult Swim for creating a uniformly outstanding collection of coherent choice cuts from the likes of Black Lips, Apache Drop Out, King Kahn and the Gris Gris and the Thee Oh Sees.

Its free, go get it now here, right now! Go!

And when you get it  - play it and drink beer. Lots of beer. Buckets of beer, everything craft or in a cute label-sporting bottle is too bourgeois so I suggest it must be PBR, yes, PBR tall cans is what is called for. Now….

Be in my video, Darling, every night

Video having reached middle age had a tough choice in front of it. Maybe meandering along in the margins of what was its maternal motherlode, Music Television, amongst the debris washed up on the Geordie and Jersey shores? Or try and keep up with the new bastard child of technology, the so-named Internet, the world wide home of at least 50 billion wicked thoughts of porn, minority interests, porn, memes, narcissism, slightly stranger porn and its best buddy ever, Youtube. The choice was not that difficult and so just as mature middle aged Vid has outgrown his Vid Vicious phase and is not, repeat not, on the tweak again and looks back on his childhood friends VHS, his strange Dutch cousin Philip, or V2000 as he liked to cruise the electric grapevine as, and the slightly odd compact little Japanese buddy Sonny Beta with nothing but fond memories, Vid more Mature is now happy with the bits and bytes.
Vid's best buddy Youtube registered over a trillion hits in 2011 and thats not a slap around the face. In a pique of bravura it is forecasting Vid to be over 90% of all web traffic by the time MTV disappears into musical insignificance on its 35 year birthday, in 2016, and changes its name to something more nominatively deterministic, probably involving an assortment of arsewipe, crap, puerile, Shitwoww in random order. All those third world youf who will leap from atavistic starvation to connected, missing out the web and going directly to mobile, will be watching old Vid as will all of us, globally accounting for over 50% of all mobile traffic. Now the viewing subject of choice in sub-saharan Africa or Brazil may not be all frisky, fun and frivolous and may feature evangelical exhortations to punish gays or un-believers along side clips of Lionel Messi doing his annoying schtick. However in its maturity and creativity it is an amazing medium for emotional and aesthetic grand gestures. Take every trick in the Hollywood, BollyWood and le Bois de la Nouvelle Vague and cram it into 3 minutes and we have the visual laugh track to our musical lives. We have every palette, color, texture and tone. We go slow, oh, yes, we go slowly slow and slowed further and we so love to destruct and deconstruct at a glacial pace. We can use light and dark as a continuum; reality, cartoon reality, clay-motion reality and its all so real. Bunuel's art house has met the XXX house and the Bear in the Big House and it has coalesced to provide the incredible diversity of what is arguably as integrated into our musical experience now as the double gatefold album cover of yore was the visual ying to the aural yank of our consumer chain.
Our Vid has grown up under the spotlight of high definition and moved on from what Uncle Frank derided as the atrocious cheap stereotypes found in all music videos for about 10 terrible years:
"I’ll make you wear red shoes
There’s a cheesy atom bomb explosion
All the big groups use
Atomic light will shine
Through an old venetian blind
Making patterns on your face,
Then it cuts to outer space"
Now Frank did produce a couple of claymo gems including Baby Snakes which is a neanderthal ancestor on the evolutionary path to today's vimeo world order. I have been enjoying a couple of examples that are one way of showing how far this has come as an integrated part of our musical experience. I am not arguing for these as the ne plus ultra of what this fabulous mature art form can look like; rather that these are three well executed individual pieces and just for giggles - not a lot of color but lots of texture, palette and tone.
Die Antwoord are very fucking clever, don't think this is low art from low class Afrikaners -  these two have their dystopic world down, and I fink dey are freeky.
Jay-Z is global, gazillion grossing, gobsmackingly successful and geared for business, he never gets stuck in one auto-tune world, he always moves on to the next one.
Azealia Banks is now also gobsmacking her way to mainstream fame but when she was in the 212 eating her way into our hearts she did it with a very clever 3 minutes 26 seconds of slut sensual slushy, her Cockaleekie was not soup by the Blue Bayou, no, she was on her way to ruin people.
So while we are film noiring our way around these little ditties what should we be drinking? Well I think Ninja has already answered that for us, its Gangsta Beer or as its normally ordered from your local Safeway "Moet & Chandon" non vintage champagne, drunk like a 40, by hand, because as much as you would like, you actually can't afford the Cristal..not yet, not until your own Vid goes platinum.

More sweaties spotted too

Scared bunnies run through the city and avoid the foxes by hiding out at the Fillmore. More sweaties spotted too.

So for the uninitiated, the term used affectionately by the English, from the London area, for the Scots our brothers from north of the Border, is “Sweaties”. This epithet is the shortening of Cockney Rhyming Slang for Sweaty Socks as in Jocks. In past times all Scots were referred to as Jocks, by the English, which is a diminutive for John or James, partly due to their support during the war of Succession for the catholic King James. It’s similar to all Welsh being assumed en groupe to be Taffs (phonetic pronunciation of the popular first name David) and Micks or Paddies for the Irish (ditto Michael and Patrick).

So 350 miles north of the Cockney rejects the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and minor towns around have spawned over the years much amazing musicianship and great song writing. The litany of successful Scots’ rock bands is lengthy, liturgist and laudable for the relative small population of 5 million. The social history of Scotland is one of strife and sadness. The backdrop of forced expulsion from the highlands by the English, large scale emigration of up to 10% of the population as heavy industry waned and over representation in the British Armed Forces where, although Scots were only 10 per cent of the British population, they made up 15 per cent of the armed forces and eventually accounted for 20 per cent of the dead resulted in the population being around that mark since the end of the reign of Queen Victoria.

So it is unsurprising that the creative outpourings should reflect the tough life, the weather – which is enough to send a man to drink – and the economic demise, it is commonly hard-nosed and often lachrymose. Whether poetry, fiction or music there is bitter bedrock of bad experiences, bad food, bad jobs and bad luck. As Irvine Welsh so admirably put it in his admirable Trainspotting: “Fuckin failures in a country of failures. Its nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant healthy society to be colonised by. No..we are ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wis the shite thev got. Ah hate the Scots.”

With the exception of say Belle and Sebastian or CameraObscura who manage to cast a fey veneer of cheerful bonhomie over even their sad songs the canon of Scot popular music has been strident, resilient, uplifting but honed through bitterness. Even the instrumental genius of Mogwai tends to lean towards the chromatic tabulation of getting shit faced drunk and smashing stuff up. Primal Scream, Arab Strap, Malcolm Middleton, Teenage Fanclub, The Primevals, Glasvegas, Twilight Sad, Jesus and Mary Chain, not a breezy poppy love song among them.

Now that is not a bad thing, after all there is only so much Abbaful effervescence that one can deal with and life generally is improved by listening to someone else’s problems.

So having listened to the excellent troubled ballads of The Twilight Sad as support to Frightened Rabbit at their Fillmore the main attraction took the stage. I have an issue with bands that don’t make any effort with lights and stage dressing. It’s an example of a lack of creativity or a frustration around the lost opportunity to tie some visual statement to the aural spectacle. The Rabbits have a cool stage back drop of telegraph wires receding into a distance and their lights are at least timed and varied even if this is not the kind of slide show, oil projector fantasies of the Fillmore of yore when the Airplane's paeans to the stars were illuminated musical manuscripts.

They tell their tales of sad lives and strong choruses ensure we all sing along and bounce around with shared joy at their pedestrian verse:

“She cries on the high street just to be heard,

A screaming anchor for nothing in particular,

At the foot of the fuck of it
And dragging her heels in the dirt”

That is part of the glorious State Hospital. We smile along to the uplifting ditties like Loneliness, Not Miserable and a Late March Death March. The Hutchinson brothers and the rest of the band are happy to be back in town, enjoying the crowd, baiting us with poor comparisons to Seattle. The musicianship supports the strong song form and the large presence of women in the audience shows they are commercially hitting their stride as a Caledonian take on the populist modern folk approach that has worked so well for Mumfords and Ted Sharpe’s 0’s.

So as we stream out into the nearly deserted Monday night streets we are heartened to have metaphorically have swim “through the shit I write
How can I talk about life and warmth, I've got a voice like a gutter in a toxic storm” but we do feel warmed and life is good, thanks to the dark words pouring from Scott Hutchinson’s mouth.
So if you are going to dive into the veritable oil slick of despondency of the Bunnies what should you be drinking? Come on, really? there is only one drink and that is Whisky and Scotch at that. The kindly ladies and gents at K&L Wines have an excellent blended whisky called the Bank Note and I would not want to drown sorrows in anything less appropriate.

Bright Lights

“The Blues had a baby and they called it Rock’n’Roll”. Blues booms have passed with their sonic wave reverberating behind them, with the first OGs less original gangsters and more hardworking geezers making a crust. The shock of 1960’s London dragging itself out of the oppression of Macmillan’s 50’s and into an electric world was fittingly a metaphor for the brave few “folk blues” practitioners washed up on those grey shores in that decade. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Son House came, sang and conquered the eager young men and women in coffee shop BoHo style turtle necks and pipes. Traditional folk music in England had its elements of hard times, hard scrabble existence and the ‘man’ in the Lord of the Manor and Droit de Seigneur. So southern folk blues resonated, as did the urban Chicago more swinging electric blues, whether you came for the picking or for the raw excitement you came and you were never the same.

I had the odd chance to share a beer with Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood fame, a band whose name was taken from a song of the 50’s made famous by Etta James. It was in the 80’s in a pub in Sydney and we were both a long way from home. Lee was still wearing that shitty white jacket and was dying of lung cancer, unknowingly. I was a lone Brit in a sea of youthful tanned Aussies who happened to love both his band from their glory years a decade prior and his chosen vocation.

He talked of being a teenager in Essex going up for a night to Wardour Street and watching the Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated sharing the bill with Hooker and Waters and never being the same. Now god bless Alexis, great DJ and spreader of the word of the Church of Blues but he was never that great a blues shouter but he did pick some amazing sidemen. So I asked Lee who had he seen back then who made the most impression and he replied the Wolf. Howling Wolf, Chester Burnett, was as Bill Graham once said of another great axe man, a ”devil, devil, devil of a man” he was big, very fucking intimidating, he had a voice that could be used in LOTR voice overs and he sang about working class life where whiskey was cheap and so was the price of a man’s life.

I hung around coffee bars playing table football and pinball as a kid and young teenager listening to the jukebox playing classics like “When My Left Eye Jumps”, “Hellbound Train”, “Black Magic Woman”. This complete genre of music was fashioned by white working class kids stealing riffs and in some cases – I am looking at you Robert Planet – the whole words of songs and making it their own. Mix in a pop perspective in terms of time signature and the benefit of guitar and amp technology and we have the original blues boom in all its glory. It spawned Cream, Zeppelin and from those blues riff and drums grew forth heavy metal and rawk, Merkan style. It always amazed me that most of US so-called rock’n’roll actually got its lead from those poor pale English waifs rather than the original inspirations. The men who started electric blues in segregated America, in the 50’s, that spread the word with those great early tours of England under the auspices of Mike Vernon’s apocryphal Blue Horizon label. It was almost as if the color bar in the US needed the transatlantic mutation for music via John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, The Yardbirds, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac and the like to then return to the land where the music had its roots to allow young white American kids to be able to access it. The Kings, Freddy, Albert and BB carried on regardless as did the originals, suffering near bankruptcy along the way other than Hooker who was smart enough to keep the songs and the copyright to himself. There was sadly an element of truth to the Cheech and Chong sketch about Blind Melon Chitlin being paid a “bottle of whiskey and a hooker” for a recording session.

Since that time only one black man has really spanned both worlds like Waters, Hooker and Burnett did and sadly he also had to do it in the UK to get a break first and that was Hendrix. He broke through with a band put together by the very astute former bass player of the Animals. Chas Chandler saw the young Jimi in the US when he was making his living on the Chittlin Circuit playing for Curtis Knight as a band guitarist but ripping the soul out of his cheap Fender through a wah-wah pedal. Took him to Swinging London, promised him and delivered unlimited white girls for pleasure, lashings of drugs and then put him in a studio with a very accomplished jazz drummer and a versatileguitarist who could also play bass. Jimi found his own path and his own band of gypsies to back him but still died in a damp hotel room in London.

So since that time African American artists have been great singers, great songwriters, great rappers, great dancers, a couple of brave outliers have been instrumentally outstanding but usually in the soft and preserved world of Jazz but nobody has taken the Blues for themselves as their culture, their word, their sound. I am sorry Robert Cray but you were just too easy listening to qualify.

So the baton has since been carried by the Vaughn Brothers, Roy Buchanan, the great Jack White and the Black Keys with no little commercial success. But look, what is that in the night sky? A new blues hero? A young amazingly talented African American who actually gunslings an axe and writes real blues songs? Really? YES. And lo his name is Gary Clark Jr and he is the real deal. He can sling as hard as anyone, out Stevie-Raying newcomers, with a voice that’s the perfect bridge between R&B and slow blues and oh, damn, he is cool looking like Jimi was so this dude is TV friendly too. At a time when the UK is enjoying a new blues boom with blues music being played in clubs again by young men and an amazing bunch of women (check out Chantal McGregor, Joanne Shaw Taylor and Jo Harman), there is hope yet for the US to wake up and acknowledge its own amazing blues heritage. And if they cant do that at least recognize the immense talent that Gary Clark represents. Listen to his update of “Bright Lights” or “When My Train Pulls In” and you have living kicking snarling guitar blues. By a young cool intelligent black man not some balding 60-year-old English guy.

So if you are listening to some hard ass blues by Gary what should you be drinking? My advice is a “Fucked Up” beer and shot a la Rio Grande Bar, which is on the edge of civilization i.e. near the Civic Center in downtown SF. So take a can of beer, Dos Equis works fine, dip the top edge of the can in salt, pop it, pour in two shakes of hot sauce, grab a Hornitos Tequila shot or Rye Whiskey, your choice and you are ready to get numb with Gary guiding you down that emotional path. If you go to the Rio Grande that will cost you $7 and worth every penny.

Like a drunken punch up at a wedding 1-17-10

"you’ve come here just to start a fight

you had to piss on our parade

you had to shred our big day

you had to ruin it for all concerned

in a drunken punch-up at a wedding"

I think that Charles Shaw has a lot to answer for, actually most of it positive like ensuring America has its own vin de table, like debunking the voodoo about wine being something you need a special qualification to be able to buy or enjoy. Like you’ve only got to plant vines and 5 years later become rich. 2 Buck Chuck may not be welcome at my house for dinner if I am serving great food and wine - I mean do me a favour, as much as you can drink it at home because its cheap, at least make an effort to bring something that shows you have some imagination! But, its what America likes - fruit forward, lots of finish, no tannins and lots of sweet alcohol - and its what they buy.

So why is it like a punch up at a wedding?

Because its low class, cheap and nasty and it ruins a party, but there is something perverse about us that we can’t stop taking a peak and watching it, we get some vicarious thrill out of a punch up, as long as its someone else involved. Watching people buy 2 Buck Chuck is a guilty pleasure. Makes us feel self righteously smug...and what wrong with smug every now and again, good for your self esteem.

Saint Peter in satin, he's like Buddha with mace - 1-26-10

The occasional wine song series continues; this time its Elbow. Partly because I think Guy Garvey would be excellent party company, wine and drinking are all common themes in his songs, a guy who is thinking and sinking the wine. So what to drink while listening to Forget Myself?

"Do you move through the room with a glass in your hand

Thinking too hard about the way you stand

Are you watching them pair off and drinking them long

Are you falling in love every second song"

We have all experienced the joyful meeting of meek and menace, the man at the velvet rope. Shaven of head, dressed or squeezed usually like a black pudding into a shinier than thou dark suit, earpiece in the cauliflower appendage. Someone to help the evening pass without pain, someone to keep the riff-raff out. A wine that has that mix of the rough with the smooth for me is Ed Meades Mendocino Zinfadel, it is North Coast so not as posh as its peers. Tannins are there like bruises on a bouncer, dark it is and it packs a punch but again not like a real heavyweight, the kind of guy on the velvet rope is never the best around.

Once you get to know Ed, as I have now gotten to call him as I use false bonhomie to try and get in ahead of the line, you appreciate the subtle strength as by now you know there is no real menace. You can forget yourself, so go ahead start kicking up mischief and feeding the fire....

New York - New Torque - 2-13-10

“Money has been here so long its a little decrepit. If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead.” Chase Insteadman, the hero of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

Cat Power achieves the nigh on impossible, take a stone cold classic and make it your own and she does it with a song so old, so storied, so cliched, so peripatetic that even I have been known to karaoke it to a terrified room full of Singaporeans. Most people identify New York or New York, New York with Hoboken’s own little sicilian or his duet partner the perennially 45 year old Lisa Minelli, even Phish have had a go at this song. 

Cat Power’s New York is grubby, thrusting and ultimately the club you want to be a member of, she sings her way out of the little town blues and into the greatest city there is. London is a great collection of villages thrust side by side like a collection of strangers in a tube train on Monday morning, its not a city. Tokyo is the conurbation, the greatest continuous anonymous collection of concrete, glass and neon but its not a city. New York was built as a city and it is quintessentially American. To be at home in this city you must be drinking something equally Yankee, and its not Budweiser and its not Jack and Coke; it might be a Manhattan but really? Italian vermouth and Scotch whisky is hardly what you would call a natural marriage.

So it has to be a Zinfandel, like New York a unique expression of italian roots in the new world and for that extra zaftig how about we blend it with Morvedre and Syrah? The French may have paid for the Statue of Liberty but they would never give you the liberty to screw with the noble grapes like that, only the new world libertarians would do that. So what would Cat hold in her elbow length gloves as she whips you with wanting to be in the very heart of it, and remember this is a gal who lived in bars?

Linne Calodo’s 2007 Problem Child is what she would spill on her vagabond shoes, very rich, lush, expensive and a little brash like the Upper East Side.

As Chase says she must “ abide with the life of Manhattan as it slakes itself on sundown pleasures, as it dines and it boozes, then.. tuck it in for the night and go on”.

Just another cover version - 3-1-10

"Whether the shock of hearing a favorite song abused by someone you hate or the surprise occasioned by a fundamentally annoying song getting a new and attractive coat of paint by someone you love  - the emotions are mixed but covers are a great way of getting more juice from an often over-squeezed lemon"

I love a great cover song, I hate covers bands, go figure that one out. I always loved the blues boom bands of the 60’s like the original Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, Taste, Canned Heat, Cream and in a way most of their output was ripped straight off the Chess back catalog, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page got rich squeezing Robert Johnson’s lemon, but as he sold his soul to the devil maybe thats ok? So if my musical taste has been inspired by covers much of my wine taste has always been intrigued by covers - wines from one region being produced in another with great results. This is not always the case as anyone who has drunk Paso Robles Pinot Noir will attest. For every Lily Allen’s cover of the Kook’s Naive or Jolene covered by the White Stripes there is Rod Stewart killing something by Sam Cooke or James Taylor throwing up over Summertime Blues ( I mean, really? really? Can you imagine that conversation : James ( for it is indeed he of bald pate and insousciant smile) “I think for my covers album I need to show the real rocking JT” Producer Pete: “ You are rock incarnate Jimbo, what did you have in mind, some AC-DC, some Metallica?” “I’m thinking Summertime Blues, I’m channeling Eddie Cochran right now, maybe a little Hound Dog too” Producer Pete: “Jimmy, Jimmy, outstanding choice, that will really have them tuning in to your next PBS Special, maybe we can get you a leather poncho to sharpen up the image too”).

Cover albums themselves are always a bit dodgy, the odd song thrown in live, the change of pace song on an album is one thing but a whole 10 or 12 songs is a challenge, although there is never a shortage of people ready to give it a good old thrash around the persian rug. The best ones are those that bring something new and interesting and great examples are the Easy Star All Stars Dub Side of the Moon which is a stoner’s dream or their Radiodread reggae covers of Radiohead’s perky pop posings. Beck is doing some great stuff as the Record Club project where a bunch of friends and he cover a storied album in a day, he posts the video of each song on the site http://www.beck.com/recordclub/

To date he has done The Velvet Underground and Nico, Songs by Leonard Cohen and recently Oar, the Skip Spence classic released originally in 1969  just as psychotic paranoia grabbed him by the throat, luckily Beck with help from Feist, Jamie Lidell and most of Wilco make some great sounds unlike the original which at best is a hard listen or as someone described it “teetering near the precipice of sanity”. So taking something that was originally not that great and adding to it, the perfect cover...

So what would I drink while listening to these Varshons? a great cover adds something and must stand or fall on its own merits whether or not still being recognizable as the original work. So to the great cover artist of Santa Cruz, Randall Grahm, and his tribute to Chateauneuf du Pape, Bonny Doon’s Cigare Volant ’08. More or less classic CdP grape types, depending on the vintage, but always harking back from the foggy mountains of Northern California to the banks of the Rhone and the summer hangout of the Popes. Its certainly bigger than some of its European relatives  but is not all bratty or brash, do yourself a favor and drink this..oh, and if you do need some Summertime Blues there is only one version - Who: Live At Leeds. Period, end of story.

Alison's starting to happen - 3-21-10

"It's so mesmerizing,

can't describe it, 

all that inside, hey.

No one's heard her last name,

I ain't asked,

So, who am I to blame?

An earthquakes started forming underneath my feet today..."

To be given talent is something we all assume is a blessing yet torments and trials seem to trivialize many god given gifts and that moment in the sun that seems destined passes by and like a ship without a rudder they drift out of our collective consciousness. Every parent hopes their children have something to give them that little kick start, the pushy mum meets the precocious little poppet, the star struck singing tot and the preternaturally precise pre-teen preening through her piano recital.  The results of this post modernist desire for our offspring to brighter, smarter; no longer the wish for the bigger, faster, stronger child that is the mark of the survivor of “not enough times”. Breastfeeding to build better brains, no-one wants their child to become someone’s drug buddy. Rest assured though much of the great music comes from kids who ultimately failed to meet mainstream society’s benchmarks, Morrissey, Adams and Stipe did not spend their teenage years being driven from soccer practice to piano lesson to SAT coaching, they were not the outdoor types.

Most productive environment for future royalties income? Smarter Preschool, Unlocking Your Child's Intellectual Potential? how about the great big no of being locked away in a bedroom over a garage on a yellow button cloth couch with a bong, two battered Fender copies and the back catalog of the Velvets blasting the pattern off the wallpaper, now you are talking.

Evan Dando bounced out of Skidmore to spend his time with other young whelps in Boston and founded the Lemonheads. He wrote songs that were sweet on the outside and sour on the inside about life in the louche lane, girls, drugs and hanging out. A handsome lad he balanced acceptance of his jangly pop-rock and good looks into the arms of Mrs Robinson and her friends with admissions of smoking crack and hanging out with Oasis and the Manc moron brothers. And just when the hits and videos did a rockin stroll young Evan went out on a long limb and the moment passed.

If you were to pick a role model who would pick Rick James? Evan did and bless him, he actually got Rick to sing about not wanting to get stoned but wanting to get stoned. But Evan is not a quitter and he is still making great music, the voice is still there unlike, say, Ian McCullough and he still has a great ear for melody and harmony. But, and this is why the Knoxville girls and I still love him, his music always kicks on, noisy enough to still upset the neighbours and make you drive faster than is good for you while singing your head off.

So what wine makes you feel like that, what wine deserves to be a bit part in your life? Au Bon Climat Pinot Noir 2007 Santa Maria Valley, Clendenens’s entry Pinot is everything you want from a New World Pinot, fruit and delicious yet it still tastes like Pinot rather than a Syrah/Pinot blend, it drinks like your favorite T shirt. Its got Evan’s pretty boy feel but still has a heart and style that is not pretentious, this wine is topsy-turvy, and it is mine to eat, its “the pebble in my mouth and underneath my feet.

its the puzzle piece behind the couch, made the sky complete”. This wine is definitely starting to happen.

The flattened fifth is also known as the sharpened fourth - Another low end theory

"“Jazz music is not dead, it just smells funny”

Jazz music by its very nature is as about as exciting as finding an old and unwashed pair of socks under the bed, yes its familiar and has its uses - think really bad Italian restaurants or elevators - but there is just something unsavory about being caught in possession of it. I think all of us have at times tried to be slightly more hip and cool by trying to get into Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis or Coltrane or - here you can fill in the blank- and I have the virtually unplayed Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool CDs at home to prove I am not immune. I did stop short of the black woolen roll neck jumper, thick rim glasses, skinny black jeans ( well that’s a lie I do have those) and winkle pickers, Kerouac under arm and too much espresso in stomach. Jazz is music that if you have any ounce of grey matter you should prefer over pop or country, after all it has variety, beats, great playing and yet it sits there quietly festering in the corner, the aging relative, that now incontinent, is no longer involved in the post Thanksgiving lunch game of Monopoly or Bin Fa.

I am a big fan of NPR but the local KCPR station plays so much blather jazz that I feel like fire bombing the station; hearing Neal Losey smoothly ejaculate “that was the inimitable Dave Brubeck and now for some Diane Krahl on your Morning Cup of Jazz”, I mean seriously, that show is emetic. Why is that? Because they confuse the crappy no-risk elevator music for what jazz can really be which is not soporific or smooth or sly or subtle but challenging. Get atonal occasionally, harmony is only ever improved by discord.

Jazz can move you emotionally but the emotion does not have to be one of an overbearing sense of nausea or ennui. It can move you by making your brain work, it should move your feet if nothing else because in jazz you are free from standard 4/4 time structures, it should make you smile. Now doesn’t that sound like the same problem with Merlot, ennui rather than smiles? Both very popular in the 60‘s and 70‘s, still loved mainly in obscure places like Japan and Holland, both have been pushed sideways and out of popular culture.

Well, the good news pop-pickers is that I have both to share - jazz that will make you feel good and some serious Merlot smacking you around the face saying “Respect Me, Sonny Boy!”  Bonobo - the musical act rather than the dwarf chimpanzee - is primarily Simon Green plus some cool people like Andreya Triana and Jack Wylie from the Portico Quartet. His new album Black Sands is the perfect soundtrack to the coming spring, great beats, good songs and musically diverse in a way that rewards repeat listening rather than losing your interest. And if you do like it then check out Portico’s Isla which features the Swiss vibes like instrument the Hang - if that’s not a compulsion to download it right now you are not drinking enough!

I have recently survived two wet weeks in the monsoon of London and the Dordogne and have just tasted what Merlot should be like, bold, fruitful both in attack and finish and its name is St Georges St Emilion. Up on the hill behind St Emilion the village and the main vineyards just before you get to Montagne St E is the small AOC of just 8 producers. Its the same underlying soil and elevation as the best of Pomerol but like we purists prefer our wine, women and music - beautiful yet understated and contrarian. I tasted the fabulous ’08 Chateau la Bergere with Camille Benoist its personal Svengali, and it is not only fabulous but it will make you respect Merlot again, maybe you will actually admit it to your friends that yes, you do like Merlot and frankly that Pinot you keep raving about tastes like Syrah, Madame!

And maybe even seek out a Napa Merlot like they used to drink back  in the day like Duckhorn  or, or maybe not, that’s too close to getting back into the elevator with Neal and Marian McPartland.

The unmagnificent lives of adults - 5-19-10

"....but your kisses aren't enough

to keep your kids in line

so you better straighten out yourself

and give your baby time

cause if you don't give her what she needs

she'll get it where she can

she's lonely man"

Sad songs, sad moments, sad sack. The range of emotions evoked by music, movies, books, stories all, range from the elation of smiles and laughs to the throat catching, the tears stuttering out and smearing vision. The depth and response to the emotion is amplified and fueled by wine, that perfect late night moment of listening to the troubadour’s tale after that one glass too true. You know that moment when you play that song again and louder and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and its always a song that takes several listens to get under your skin. The perfect auteur of these sad songs for dirty lovers is Matt Berninger and his band of brothers, The National.

Intense, brooding songs of broken promises and lost loves are the canon of these guys and as they have aged the concerns and causes have matured and aged. As the corners have been knocked off, life has been chiseling away at their youthful heart of hearts, tugging on their sleeve of sleeves. Wars taking place behind doors in squalor and apartments in Brooklyn, being mistaken for strangers and getting lit up, this is the urban cowboy’s new pasture. The girls have grown up from wistful teens, the lust has moved on from trophy wives looking for a younger man, the relationships have life-cycled through mix tape to brutal break up, settling down and growing up.  Matt’s baritone is the perfect tone and pitched as half spoken half sung, these are the standard for the late night soliloquy. He is always leaving us with a last line thrown away, being consigned for ever as a middle brow screw up, losing his breath, cause he is evil.

Matt exhorts us “Dear, we better get a drink in you,” before we start to bore him. So what do we drink while we toast the fake empire, while we raise our glass to the mansions on the hill and the life that could have been but that never was? Something big enough for an emotional crutch, something mature enough to have stood the test of time’s changes, something that we have grown used to, watched develop and deepen with each passing vintage. T-Vine’s Gregg Brown has been hand making wines quietly in Napa since the mid 90’s and I was lucky to be introduced to them back then by John Rittmaster at Prima Vini in Walnut Creek. Gregg’s wines are hand made in the true sense with a preference for gut feel over technological tricks and his T Blend is as lush and seductive as a Napa Valley cab can be without the pretension, and being a blend it changes every vintage. T Blend ’06 has Primativo blended in and its fruit caresses the palate and the finish will encourage you to keep drinking, this is not a dapper sipper. This will get your good mix on and listening to the High Violet you will quickly enter the dark but never drab world of the National, sing, cry, smile; the whole unmagnificent life of us adults is there for the submerging.